Deaths, Technology

The Passion And Passing Of Litéra's CEO And Founder, Deepak Massand

Many legal professionals can testify to the rich legacy that Massand left them in Litéra products, and he will be deeply missed in the worlds of law and technology.

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It is difficult to coalesce the experience of a lifetime to one word, but for Deepak Massand, who passed away in his home in McLeansville, North Carolina, on December 28, it’s not: passion.

I can’t claim the benefit of regular conversations with Massand. But from our occasional meetings at industry events and briefings on Litéra Corp. products and services, I realized he was highly intelligent and literate, with good business sense and a passion for technology.

Massand is survived by his wife, Karen Kenefick-Massand, the managing director of Litéra. Paul Domnick, president of Litéra since October 2014, will continue to run the company.

Massand earned a B.S. with honors from Jawaharlal Nehru Agricultural University in Jabalpur, India. He studied sales and marketing at the University of West Virginia and advanced management at Kellogg School of Management.

Pundits may have called Massand an outsider to the legal community. Prior to becoming the founder and CEO of Litéra, he applied his education wisely in the pharmaceutical industry, where he was well versed in the agricultural base of the supply chain.

Massand was the national sales director at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical (Johnson & Johnson) and rose to become its executive director from 1993 to 1995. At Ortho-McNeil he led a multi-disciplinary team to develop, market and sell leading antibiotics in a highly regulated market. Massand later presided over Merz Pharmaceuticals from 1995 to 2000, when it established a leadership position in dermatology and plastic surgery with the patenting and launch of Mederma, a topical scar product.

As the director of Skila from 2002 to 2011, Massand was presented with services from outside counsel and, correspondingly, its underlying inefficiencies. But rather than excoriate the industry as a customer and client, he did something about it and created Litéra Corp., a content risk and productivity management software provider, using his own resources–including his passion for technology.

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Massand authored numerous patents for the legal industry, including the following:

  • A software product for editors and reviewers to simultaneously engage in real-time collaboration in document review;
  • A method and system to compare documents and redline changes in Microsoft Office documents and their embedded objects and images;
  • An algorithm to show the content changes to split and merged tables in Word and Excel documents; and
  • A system to use document editing and comparison tools outside of Microsoft Office without installing a Microsoft add-in.

Many legal professionals can testify to the rich legacy that Massand left them in Litéra products. He will be deeply missed in the worlds of law and technology.

Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.

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